How Did These People Survive?

A fascinating story, reported at The New York Times: After a Window Washer’s 47-Floor Plunge, the Big Question Is: How Did He Survive? By JAMES BARRON and AL BAKER Published: December 12, 2007 A 29-year-old man plunges 17 stories in the atrium of a hotel in Minneapolis, landing on an overhang. A 22-year-old amateur sky diver goes into free fall more than a mile above the earth when his main parachute and reserve chute fail to open. He lands in a three-foot-deep duck pond. Both men survived. The question of why was echoed when a window-washing platform gave way on Friday and two brothers preparing to clean the black-glass skin of an apartment building on the Upper East Side fell 47 floors. Why did one die and the other survive, though he is grievously injured? Five days later, the answer can still be only guessed at. Officials and window-washing colleagues of the two brothers speculated that they tried to ride their platform to the ground, as one window washer said he had been trained to do in such an accident. If so, they were relying on basic physics — the platform would have generated some small amount of wind resistance, slowing the fall — and luck. Fortune, if there is any to be found, was with the brother who survived, Alcides Moreno, 37. He was conscious and sitting up soon after firefighters arrived. “He was on top of what was left of the platform that they were working on,” said one official who was at the scene. The brother who was killed, Edgar Moreno, 30, may have been thrown off the platform as it hurtled toward the ground. The official, who did not want to be identified because he was not authorized to speak about the investigation, said part of his body was under the platform. It was a distinctly urban kind of tragedy, one that brought to mind a distinctly different kind of accident — long-distance falls by military pilots or sky divers whose parachutes failed to open, and who survived. It was also distinctly different from the case of Joshua Hanson, a Wisconsin bar owner who survived another harrowing fall. He crashed through a window on the 17th floor of a Minneapolis hotel in January after what a police spokeswoman described to The St. Paul Pioneer Press as a little “tomfoolery and a little too much to drink.” He broke a leg and his lungs collapsed, but he left the hospital after seven days. “I’m doing fine,” he said this week. Just as Mr. Hanson’s friends marveled at his recovery, experienced rescuers were still marveling on Tuesday at Alcides Moreno’s survival. “It is nothing short of a miracle — nothing short of a miracle — to fall from that height and still be, well, to still be alive,” said Deputy Chief Thomas E. McKavanagh of Division 3, an operational commander on the scene after the accident and a 28-year veteran of the Fire Department. Alcides Moreno was in critical condition at NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell hospital in Manhattan on Tuesday, and hospital officials have refused to discuss details of his condition. Relatives said over the weekend that Mr. Moreno’s injuries included collapsed lungs, damaged kidneys and bone fractures. His wife, Rosario, said at her home that his face looked good, considering what happened. He has a broken nose and a gash above one eye, she said, adding, “We’re taking it day by day.” The doctors have not been able to explain how her husband managed to survive because, Ms. Moreno said, they had never treated such a case. “They’ve never dealt with anything like this,” she said. “They’re learning from it.” She said they had not given her a prognosis. The brothers were employed by City Wide Window Cleaning and were working at the Solow Tower, at 265 East 66th Street, at Second Avenue, when the scaffold gave way. Vincente Bustamante, 35, a good friend of both Moreno brothers and himself a window washer for 12 years, said he believed that Alcides Moreno survived because he followed the training window washers receive when they learn their job. Window washers are taught that if a scaffold gives way, they should lie down flat on the platform, on their stomach because, Mr. Bustamante said, it gives them the best chance of survival should the scaffold catch on something on the way down. Maybe that is what Alcides Moreno did, he said. “If you go over, that’s it,” he said. “You’re dead.” He believed that that was what happened to Edgar Moreno — that he was either thrown from the platform, or jumped from it out of fear. “That’s your first instinct, because you’re scared — to jump,” Mr. Bustamante said. It was not clear how much training the Morenos had received. The city requires people who work on a suspended scaffold to have a certificate showing they have completed a safety course. The city also requires each contractor to have a licensed master or special rigger, who can designate a foreman to oversee a job. Local 32BJ of the Service Employees International Union, which represents unionized window washers in Manhattan, provides a weekly course over 18 months. Matthew Nerzig, a spokesman for the union, said the course is supposed to supplement 3,000 hours of apprentice work. He said there are no specific state requirements for window washers, but tradesmen are supposed to have 2,000 hours as apprentices and 180 hours of classroom training. But the company the Morenos were working for, City Wide Window Cleaning of Jamaica, Queens, is not a union company. The company has not returned calls since the accident, and Ms. Moreno said no one from City Wide had called her to express condolences. At least two agencies are investigating the accident — the city’s Buildings Department and the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Chief McKavanagh, who was helping to oversee the rescue, said it appeared that lightweight material on the platform may have absorbed some of the blow for Alcides Moreno. It may have acted as a sort of shock absorber, he said. “If they both rode it down, which is quite possible, God bless them if they had the wherewithal to continue to hold on,” Chief McKavanagh said. “That is incredible.” “It is a horrible story,” he continued, adding that if Mr. Moreno lives, “that will be a miracle.” “I do not like to use that word so often,” he said, “but this is.” Nate Schweber contributed reporting.